BY Daniel Bampoe
The trial involving former National Signals Bureau (NSB) Director-General Kwabena Adu-Boahene took a contentious turn on August 26, 2026, as his lawyer, Samuel Atta Akyea, subjected a prosecution witness Frank Marshall Cromwell, a Staff Officer of the Economic and Organised (EOCO) to a detailed cross-examination over the handling and interpretation of financial records linked to an alleged GH¢49.1 million transaction.
Adu-Boahene is standing trial alongside Angela Adjei Boahene and Advantage Solutions Limited in a case before the High Court in Accra, with Justice Francis Apangabuno Achibonga presiding.
The proceedings of August 26 show Samuel Atta Akyea appearing with Peter Osei-Asamoah for the accused persons, while the prosecution was represented by its lead counsel, Dr Justice Srem-Sai, deputy Attorney General.
The day’s proceedings centred largely on the prosecution’s evidence concerning bank statements, invoices, transfers and withdrawals allegedly connected to transactions involving the National Signals Bureau, Fidelity Bank, Universal Merchant Bank (UMB), ISC Holdings Limited and other entities.
Atta Akyea’s cross-examination sought to challenge the conclusions drawn by the prosecution witness from financial documents tendered before the court. Rather than accepting the witness’s interpretation of the transactions at face value, counsel repeatedly confronted him with specific bank entries and questioned whether some amounts had properly been separated from the GH¢49.1 million said to have been dissipated.
One of the major points of contention was the witness’s analysis of bank statements relating to accounts associated with the accused persons and the Coordinator’s account at Fidelity Bank.
Earlier in the proceedings, the witness had acknowledged that UMB supplied documents relating to Advantage Solutions Limited and its subsidiary companies, and that he had studied and analysed bank statements and transactions covering the period under investigation.
The defence, however, challenged the completeness and interpretation of those documents. At one stage, Atta Akyea confronted the witness over 488 pages of bank statements supplied by UMB, suggesting that the documents contained transactions between the accounts of the accused persons and the Coordinator’s account at the Fidelity Bank.
The witness rejected the suggestion that the documents had been concealed or that the defence’s interpretation was correct.
The cross-examination became particularly pointed when counsel turned to Exhibits Y and Y1, which contained the witness’s analysis of withdrawals and transactions. The witness confirmed that the exhibits contained withdrawals totalling GH¢150,000 and GH¢1.1 million involving persons and transactions that counsel sought to connect to the larger GH¢49.1 million figure.
Atta Akyea then put it to the witness that when certain amounts relating to ISC Holdings Limited, the Coordinator’s account and Edith Ruby Adumah were deducted from the alleged GH¢49.1 million dissipation figure, the prosecution’s claim became inaccurate. The witness disagreed and maintained that the defence’s conclusion was not correct.
The defence also questioned the inclusion of a GH¢950,000 withdrawal by Izar Limited in the prosecution’s calculations. The witness acknowledged that Izar Limited was a supplier of goods and services in the National Security space and confirmed that there was a cash withdrawal involving the company.
However, he also acknowledged that statements had not been obtained from all the individuals and entities whose transactions appeared in the analysis.
Another significant issue concerned fixed deposits and subsequent transactions involving the BNC Communications Bureau Limited account. The witness explained that fixed deposits, including one of GH¢18 million, appeared in the account and were subsequently rolled over or matured at different dates.
The defence used these transactions to question whether all the money being attributed to the alleged GH¢49.1 million dissipation could properly be treated as having been lost or misappropriated.
According to the proceedings, a third fixed deposit of GH¢18 million was made on September 8, 2020, and matured on December 8, 2020. The defence subsequently referred the witness to bank statements in Exhibit U and questioned the treatment of the deposits in relation to the three cheques that were said to constitute the GH¢49.1 million. The witness maintained that the deposits were not part of the three cheques.
The final exchanges of the day were among the most confrontational. Atta Akyea suggested that the witness had combined funds from the three cheques with other funds in the BNC operations account at UMB in order to arrive at the alleged GH¢49.1 million amount. The witness rejected the suggestion.
Counsel further accused the witness of making representations without sufficiently accounting for the actual facts contained in the financial records. Again, the witness disagreed.
Atta Akyea then returned to two deposits—one of GH¢217,775 and another of GH¢159,007—which he argued had been included in the witness’s calculation of the alleged GH¢49.1 million dissipation.
He put it to the witness that deducting those amounts would expose serious weaknesses in the arithmetic underpinning the prosecution’s case. The witness nevertheless maintained that the defence’s interpretation was incorrect.
The proceedings therefore ended without the witness conceding the defence’s central argument that the prosecution’s calculation was fundamentally flawed. What the cross-examination did establish, however, was that the interpretation of the GH¢49.1 million figure remains fiercely contested, with the defence seeking to distinguish between money allegedly connected to the three cheques and other deposits, transfers, withdrawals and fixed deposits appearing in the relevant bank accounts.
The hearing also exposed a broader dispute over the evidentiary foundation of the prosecution’s financial analysis.
Earlier in the proceedings, the prosecution witness acknowledged that he was not a professional accountant, although he told the court that he had received training in money-laundering investigations and in following the money trail. He also acknowledged that some of the analysis contained in Exhibits Y and Y1 had not been validated by a professional accountant.
That admission became significant to the defence’s line of questioning, as Atta Akyea sought to test whether conclusions about alleged dissipation could safely be drawn from the witness’s own analysis of the bank statements without professional accounting validation.
The August 26 proceedings also revisited the controversy over documents obtained from UMB and Fidelity Bank. The prosecution had relied on bank records and invoices in its investigation, while the defence challenged the relevance, completeness and interpretation of some of those materials.
At one point, the court directed that questions concerning the missing or allegedly omitted pages of bank statements were relevant and should be answered by the witness.
